Will the Veterans Administration listen to his theories, accept his statistics, and take action of behalf of Vietnam veterans? Codario thinks they will. He believes that the men and women who run the VA are honest people who are stifled by the inherent inefficiency of big government; moreover, he intensely dislikes what he calls “Monday morning quarterbacking,” and says that trying to place blame for what has happened to Vietnam veterans will only prolong their agony.
“Look,” he says, shuffling a stack of papers on his desk, “it’s just too easy if you ask me to say, ‘Hey, Dow did this, and the VA did that.’ Sure, maybe there was conflict of interest back then, and we all know that somebody makes, or rather made, a lot of money from selling herbicides. But it’s just too easy, if you ask me, to look back fourteen years and place the blame. That just isn’t the thrust of my work. I’m just trying to show that these fellas have a problem, and I want to get them some help. And in getting help for them I want to say, ‘Hey, listen, these things have caused the problems.’ Let’s just make sure it doesn’t happen again because certainly the people that can help the veterans much quicker than I can are the federal government and the chemical companies. I think that where we have to exercise our diligence and care now is trying to make sure that mass herbicide spraying and pollution of the environment doesn’t continue to happen in the future.”
Codario and I shake hands and he walks me to the waiting room, where his receptionist and an elderly black woman are watching television. I ask directions to the subway, explaining that on my way to his office I had gotten off at the wrong stop. Codario, the elderly woman, and the receptionist appear shocked that I would have taken the subway, and insist on calling a cab. During the drive to the train station, the cab driver chats pleasantly, weaving skillfully in and out of the rush-hour traffic and laughing happily at his own jokes. But I am mesmerized by the clicking meter and unable to put out of my mind what Codario said as I was about to leave. The Green Beret, he told me, has continued to deteriorate. His liver and spleen are swollen, his arms and legs are often numb, and he has lost much of his coordination. Rising from a chair or sofa, he often falls down, walks into walls, stumbles about the room. He has episodes in which he goes blind for fifteen minutes, and has lost consciousness while driving, ramming into the car in front of him. Sometimes he “goes off” for a couple of days, flying into terrible rages, banging his hands through walls. X-rays have failed to determine why his urine is darkened and his head throbs and he has blood in his bowel movements.
As I pay the driver and prepare to enter the station, I remember something else Codario told me about the first Vietnam veteran to enter his office complaining of “bizarre” and “exotic” symptoms. The man’s wife, said Codario, had given birth to a horribly deformed baby girl who died in the veteran’s arms.
9. Humans, Rats, and Lesser Beings
On one wall of the receptionist’s office at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center in Portland a large female monkey and her baby snuggle beneath the caption LOVE US OR LOSE US. On the opposite wall a sullen great ape informs visitors that AROUND HERE WE CAN USE ALL THE SMILES WE CAN GET. After checking the appointment roster and handing me a name tag (NO ACCESS TO ANIMAL ROOMS), the receptionist suggests I wait in the center’s cafeteria. Fifteen minutes late Dr. Wilbur McNulty, whose research into the effects of TCDD-dioxin of rhesus monkeys has often been quoted by opponents of domestic herbicide use, appears. Thin and polite, he answers my questions with the cautious reserve of a scientist who has been drawn, somewhat against his will, into the controversy over dioxin.
The Oregon Regional Primate Research Center, McNulty explains, is one of the seven primate centers established in the early sixties as scientific institutes under the assumption “that because primates are our nearest biological relatives they might in many cases be good or even superior models of handling diseases.” Because the supply of rhesus monkeys appeared to be inexhaustible, they were considered ideal for laboratory experiments, but in recent years an international controversy has developed over the capture and sale of this species of primate. After several decades the rhesus population has been so depleted that at least one Asian nation has placed a ban on their export.
“But we don’t have to worry too much about all that,” McNulty explains with a touch of pride. “In fact, we now have over 2,500 primates living on the grounds of our center. And they live outdoors all the time all year round, and they seem to do quite well in this climate. We’re pretty self-sufficient, at least where the rhesus is concerned, and no longer depend on capture from the wild.”
When he first began feeding a select group of rhesus monkeys minute quantities of TCDD-dioxin, McNulty was actually doing research into polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which he describes as his first love. “Back some years ago, the thought was around that the toxicity of PCBs might not in fact be due to the PCBs themselves, but rather to a contaminant that was contained in the PCBs, something called polychlorinated dibenzofurans. But there really wasn’t any information available at that time on the relative potency of PCBs and/or the dibenzofurans. So, obviously, in order to investigate whether the toxicity of commercial PCBs might be due to contaminants, I had to know just what the potency of the contaminant might be. But the contaminants were not available; however, since the polychlorinated dibenzofurans are a very close relative of dioxin, which was indeed available, I started testing with a dioxin compound called TCDD. I wanted to see just what its relative potency might be, and as you can well guess, it was enormously more potent than PCBs, although qualitatively the diseases they cause are the same. On a per-weight basis dioxin is much, much stronger.”
In the beginning McNulty placed what he thought were small quantities of dioxin in the food of his rhesus monkeys. “As fools rush in,” he admits, “the doses, in retrospect, were astronomical. They were in the parts per billion instead of parts per trillion range, which is more relevant when it comes to food. I think the first level I used was twenty parts per billion in the diet, and that killed a young male rhesus monkey in twelve days. This was an estimated total intake of well under ten micrograms (TCDD) per kilogram (body weight). A level of two parts per billion was lethal in seventy-six days. I discovered that monkeys are several times more sensitive to TCDD than mice, rats, rabbits, and dogs.”
Dioxin turned out to be so toxic to his experimental animals that McNulty decided to suspend all research with TCDD until the primate center could construct a special building with carefully controlled access, assigning the care of his monkeys to only one or two well-trained people in an effort to minimize the risk of contaminating other areas of the center.
“Dioxin,” says McNulty, “is the most toxic small man-made molecule we know of. It is less toxic on a per-gram basis than some biological toxins like botulin, but that’s a very huge molecule. So molecule for molecule dioxin is probably the leader of the pack.”[16]
After consuming food containing minute amounts of TCDD, McNulty’s primates became very quiet, began losing weight, lost their appetite, grew progressively thinner and weaker, and then “just laid down and died.” Sometimes they would have episodes of retching and vomiting, but, says McNulty, “these were at the higher doses. At much, much lower doses a certain fraction of the animals remain well for one to three or four months, and then will suffer from an ailment characterized by failure of the elements of the bone marrow. They will have low white counts, very low platelet counts, so that they suffer from hemorrhages and infections and are essentially carried away by bone marrow failure.”[17]1
16
According to Harvard researcher Matthew Meselson, dioxin is also much more poisonous than the most toxic military nerve gases, which also consist of small molecules.
17
“What appears to be happening,” says Matthew Meselson, “is that cell division stops. Spermatogenesis stops, the replacement of red blood cells stops, the regeneration of the epithelial lining of the gut stops. After a few days or weeks without cell division the animals simply fall apart.”